The Numbers in Massachusetts Don't Lie

The problem with serving people a big nothingburger day after day is that, sooner or later, they get hungry and wonder why there's only a blob of ketchup there on the plate in front of them.

Coverage of the Senate race here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) between prospective Democratic nominee Elizabeth Warren and Republican incumbent Scott Brown has been dominated in recent weeks by an absurd "controversy" regarding whether or not Warren is 1/32nd Cherokee, as her family legend apparently had it, and as the various institutions at which she has been employed have touted. This thing was primarily kept aloft by the Boston Herald, my plucky little alma mater which last week actually ran a story pondering the terrible fix the Democrats were in because of this "scandal." Bang on that tin drum, kids. Blow that bugle 'til you drop.

Thanks to the good folks at Suffolk University, we learn now that the whole silly business is, at best, a sideshow and, at worst, a distraction from what's really going on. In a poll released late Wednesday, we learn what we all knew — that the race is virtually a tie, as it always has been, and that this is going to be a whopper of an election right down to November. Brown leads Warren by a point, 48-47. Incumbents do not like to be under 50 percent and, while the election has closed since a February poll that showed Warren leading by nine, which contained a significant bounce because she was still fairly new, there were 11 percent undecided in that poll, and Warren has picked up enough of them to hold Brown under 50, a barrier he's yet to crack in a head-to-head poll against her, and guarantee a super-PAC armageddon throughout the summer.

Now, as to the Last Indian War, 72 percent of the people polled had heard something about the "controversy," which is hardly a surprise. (The people unaware of it are primarily people in the far western part of the state who are outside the Boston media markets.) There's good news for Warren in that 49 percent of the people aware of the story think she's telling the truth about it, even though her public response has been a little incoherent. Better for her is the fact that 69 percent of the people polled think it's not a "significant" story. This means that better than two-thirds of the people polled have the analytical skills of a handball. You laugh, but this is not always the case.

Elsewhere, the poll shows that neither candidate has been able to define the other in the way they want to, and that both candidates have to this point defined themselves in the way they've sought to define themselves. Senator McDreamy's ads have touted him as an independent voice, not even mentioning the fact that he is a Republican, and 58 percent of the people in the poll believe that it's better to have one senator from both parties, which is rather a loaded question to my mind and makes me wonder if I should take that thing about the handball back. There is no sign in these numbers that Warren's contention that Brown is a tool of Wall Street has yet to have much effect. He also remains extremely well-liked; his 28 percent unfavorability rating remains at 28 percent, while Warren's favorability and unfavorability both ticked up slightly.

Meanwhile, Warren, who has hammered home her image as a fighter for the middle class, has a substantial 49-33 edge on the question of who most has the interests of the middle class at heart. She's also within the margin of error as to whether she or Brown will be the more "independent" senator — which, after all, has been Brown's entire pitch so far. So what we may have shaping up is a multimillion dollar, seven-month brawl over five percent of the electorate. The wild card remains the popularity of the president in the Commonwealth, who leads former one-term governor Willard Romney by 25 points, and the fact that, according to this poll, 60 percent of the people polled think the state's on the right track, a statement of support for both the president and his close friend, Governor Deval Patrick. Warren's first major ad buy was a commercial tying herself to the president. If she can capitalize on his popularity, it might just be enough to pull her across the line. Or not. I do not have enough other hands to figure that part out.

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